Chapter V: Part 2 (3)

“_Long before the pallid dawn came sifting in through chink and window they were up and about. As there were no matches in those days, the housewife ‘unkivered’ the coals which had been smothered in ashes the night before to be kept ‘alive’ till morning, and with ‘kindling’ in one hand and a live coal held on the tines of a steel fork or between iron tongs in the other, she blew and blew and blew till the splinters caught fire. Then the fire was started and the water brought from the spring, poured into the ‘kittle,’ and while it was heating the chickens were fed, and cows milked, the children dressed, the bread made, the bacon fried and then coffee was made and breakfast was ready. That over and the dishes washed and put away, the spinning wheel, the loom or the reel were the next to have attention, meanwhile keeping a sharp lookout for the children, hawks, keeping the chickens out of the garden, sweeping the floor, making the beds, churning, sewing, darning, washing, ironing, taking up the ashes, and making lye, watching for the bees to swarm, keeping the cat out the milk pans, dosing the sick children, tying up the hurt fingers and toes, kissing the sore place well again, making soap, robbing the bee hives, stringing beans for winter use, working the garden, planting and tending a few hardy flowers in the front yard, such as princess feather, pansies, sweet-Williams, dahlias, morning glories; getting dinner, darning, patching, mending, milking again, reading the Bible, prayers, and so on from morning till night; and then all over again the next day._”

Joseph S. Hall

_Mrs. Clem Enloe of Tight Run Branch was 84 years old when Joseph S. Hall photographed her in 1937. “I was told that if I took her a box of snuff, she would let me take her picture.” That’s the snuff in her blouse. She didn’t give in so easily on everything. She refused to observe the park’s fishing regulations and fished every season of the year. She was filling a can with worms when Hall approached. “See that,” she said pointing to the can, “I use them for fishing and I’m the only one in this park who’s allowed to.”_ ]

Edouard E. Exline

_The one-room log schoolhouse at Little Greenbrier, like the somewhat larger Granny’s College at Big Greenbrier, provided the basics in reading, writing, and arithmetic._ ]

Edouard E. Exline

_And judging by the smiles of Margaret Tallent and Conley Russell, the place was lots of fun._ ]

Edouard E. Exline

_Herman Matthews conducts a class in the school’s last year of operation, 1935. He was the only teacher who had completed college._ ]

Emergencies of health and sickness affected the daily routines. “Doctor-medicine” might have its place, but home remedies were considered most reliable--and available. A doctor with his saddlebag of pills and tonics might be a day’s ride or more away from the patient. But nature’s medicine chest lay almost at the doorstep. Plants in swamp and meadow, leaves and bark and roots of the forest: all healed many ailments. From ancient Cherokee wisdom and through their own observations and testing, mountain people learned the uses of boneset, black cohosh, wild cherry, mullein, catnip, balm of gilead, Solomons-seal, sassafras, and dozens of other herbs and plants.

While they found one school and laboratory in the woods and hills around them, the people of the Great Smoky Mountains also worked to provide themselves with more orthodox classrooms. Continuing customs that had begun before the War, the residents of many little communities “made-up” a school. This meant that they banded together, and each contributed to a small fund to pay a teacher’s salary for the year. The “year” was usually three months. John Preston Arthur left a vivid memoir of his experience in one of these so-called “old-field” schools, which were located on land no longer under cultivation:

“_In lieu of kindergarten, graded and normal schools was the Old-Field school, of which there were generally only one or two in a county, and they were in session only when it was not ‘croptime.’ They were attended by little and big, old and young, sometimes by as many as a hundred, and all jammed into one room--a log cabin with a fireplace at each end--puncheon floor, slab benches, and no windows, except an opening made in the wall by cutting out a section of one of the logs, here and there. The pedagogue in charge (and no matter how large the school there was but one) prided himself upon his knowledge of and efficiency in teaching the three R’s--readin’, ’ritin’ and ’rithmetic--and upon his ability to use effectively the rod, of which a good supply was always kept in stock. He must know, too, how to make a quill pen from the wing-feather of a goose or a turkey, steel and gold pens not having come into general use. The ink used was made from ‘ink-balls’--sometimes from poke-berries--and was kept in little slim vials partly filled with cotton. These vials, not having base enough to stand alone, were suspended on nails near the writer. The schools were paid from a public fund, the teacher boarding with the scholars._”

During the latter 1800s, free schools began to replace subscription schools. But the quality and methods of education did not appear to change drastically. Across the Smokies, in East Tennessee’s Big Greenbrier Cove, Granny’s College provided the rudiments of public education for many students and was an example of similar schools in the Great Smokies region. Lillie Whaley Ownby remembered the house which was turned into a school:

“_Granny College was built before the Civil War by Humphry John Ownby. This house was two big log houses, joined together by a huge rock chimney and a porch across both rooms on both sides of the house. The houses were built of big poplar logs. The rooms were 18×20 feet and both rooms had two doors and two windows. The floor was rough, hewn logs. There was a huge fireplace in it. The living room had a partition just behind the doors and a cellar about 8×10 feet._”

After Mrs. Ownby’s father had acquired the old log building, he went to Sevierville, the county seat, and proposed to the school superintendent that he would furnish this house if the county would supply a teacher for Big Greenbrier children. This was agreeable, and Granny’s College, as it was locally known, came into being.

“_The men made benches, long enough for three or four to sit on. The back was nailed up on some blocks and the children used the wall for a back rest. There was no place for books except on the benches or floor. Dad furnished wood for the fire. The boys carried it in and kept the fire going. Everyone helped in keeping the house clean and keeping water in the house._”

Church as well as school was a personalized part of family and community life in a way not known in more formal, urban situations. Each fulfilled not only its own specific function, spiritual or intellectual, but also satisfied social needs. The doctrine was strictly fundamentalist; the dominant denominations were Baptist and Methodist, although the Presbyterian influence was also present, especially in the schools that were founded with both money and teachers drawn from other regions of the country.

Each summer, Methodist camp meetings brought families together under the long brush arbors for weeks of sociable conversation and soulful conversion. The visiting ministers’ feast of oratory was matched only by the feast of victuals prepared by housewives over the campfires as they cooked and exchanged family news, quilt patterns, recipes, and “cuttings” from favorite flowers and shrubs.

Baptists were the most numerous denomination. They divided themselves into many categories, among others the Primitives, the Freewills, the Missionaries, and one small group called the Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit. Their rules were strict: no violins in church, no dancing anywhere. To be “churched,” or turned out of the congregation, was heavy punishment--and not infrequent.

One aspect of church that incorporated an important feature of mountain life was its singing. In ancient Ireland and Wales songsters had been accompanied on the harp. Settlers had brought the Old Harp song book of early hymns and anthems with them from the British Isles, and on down the valleys and across the mountains into these remote byways. The notes of this music were not round but shaped, and shape, rather than placement on a staff, indicated the note. This method simplified reading the music; and as the unaccompanied, usually untrained, singers took their pitch from a leader, they proceeded in beautiful harmony, usually in a minor key.

The mournful sound of minor chords was also familiar in the ballads common throughout the hills. Death and unrequited love were their recurring themes, whether they reached back to England and the Scottish borders, as in “Lord Thomas and Fair Elender,” or recounted some local contemporary affair. Beside their blazing hearths during long, lonely winter evenings, or at jolly gatherings or through lazy summer Saturday afternoons, mountain people remembered the past and recorded the present as they sang, altering and adding to the ballads which had been taught to them and which in turn would be handed on to another generation.

And among those visitors who would begin to search the mountains during the approaching 20th century, the folk song collectors and the ballad seekers could find here a repository of rare, pure music--much of it now forgotten even in its own homeland. The visitors would find a way of life that might seem static but which was, indeed, changing. For the early pioneers had yielded to the authentic mountaineer. His log cabin was being replaced by sash-sawn lumber in a frame house. Extensive apple orchards and corn crops yielded the basic ingredients not only for fruit and bread but for the luxuries of a brandy and whisky known also as moonshine, white lightning, Old Tanglefoot.

_Pages 88-89: Butchering was a chore shared by nearly everyone in a family. Here, the Ogles--Earl, Horace, Collie, and Willard--butcher a hog as they get ready for a long winter._

National Park Service
]

Hunting and fishing, which had been necessities for the first settlers, eventually turned into sport as well. Buffalo, elk, wolves, beavers, passenger pigeons, and a variety of other game disappeared early and forever, leaving only the memory of their presence in names like Buffalo Creek, Elk Mountain, Wolf Creek, Beaverdam Valley, Pigeon River. But deer, black bear, fox, raccoon and other animals remained to challenge the mountain man and his dogs. The relationship between a hunter and his hounds was something special. A dog shot or stolen could be cause for a lifelong feud. Names of individual dogs--Old Blue, Tige, Big Red--were cherished by their owners, as were certain breeds. The Plott dogs, named after the bear hunters who bred them in Haywood County’s Balsam range, were famous for their tenacity and strength in hunting bear.

One of the sharpest condemnations that could be laid on a mountain man concerned the hunting dogs. An early resident of Roaring Fork above Gatlinburg was a “hard, cruel man,” despised by his neighbors and in turn despising them. He had frightened children and cut a fellow “till he like to bled to death.” Finally--and most devastatingly--it was agreed that “he was the type of fellow that would pizen your dog.”

Edouard E. Exline

_Three children look on as he works at his shaving horse on a stave. His coopering equipment includes a draw knife, crow cutter, jointing plane, stave gauge, and barrel adze._ ]

Edouard E. Exline

_At his blacksmith shop Messer shapes a small metal piece, one of many he turned out just to keep his farm running._ ]

Edouard E. Exline

_Here is Messer the tanner, scrubbing the pelt side of a hide with a scythe blade after taking it out of the vat and removing the spent bark with a long-handled strainer._ ]

Edouard E. Exline

_In the mountains you had to work hard at being self-sufficient. And some men did better than others. One such man was Milas Messer of Cove Creek. Setting barrel staves to the hoop takes a bit of coordination, but Messer makes it look easy._ ]

Livestock raising was important throughout the Great Smoky Mountains. Stock laws had not yet been passed, and rail fences were built to keep cattle, horses, hogs, or sheep _out_ of gardens, fields, and yards rather than _in_ pastures, pens, and feedlots. Animals roamed the fields and woods. Hogs fattened themselves on the mast of nuts and roots from the great chestnut, oak, and hickory forests; cattle grazed on the grassy balds in summertime. By mid-May, farmers in the coves and valleys had driven their cattle into the high places of the Smokies. Once every three weeks or so thereafter, they returned to salt and “gentle” them, thus keeping them familiar with their owners. In October, before the first snowfall, the cattle were rounded up. If the season had been good, livestock drives to near or distant markets began.

Charles S. Grossman

_Salt licks are among the few remaining pieces of evidence of the great herding activity that once flourished in the Smokies. Notches were cut into logs or chiseled into rocks so the salt wouldn’t be wasted as it would be if placed on the ground. The salt was good for the cattle, and the regularity of the procedure helped to keep them from becoming completely wild._ ]

During both the roundup and the drive, livestock marks played a critical role of identification. These were devised by each farmer--and acknowledged by his neighbors--as the “brand” signifying ownership. These might be various “crops,” “knicks,” and “notches:” an “underbit” (a crop out of the under part of the ear), or a “topbit” or a “swallow-fork” cut in the skin below the neck, or a combination of them all. If several kinds of animals were included on a livestock drive, there was a settled rule of procedure. Cattle led the way, followed by sheep, then hogs, and finally turkeys, which were usually the first to start peering toward the sky and searching for the night’s resting place.

All of these plodding, grunting, gobbling creatures were kept in order with the help of one or two good dogs. If a hunter’s dogs were valuable, a livestock drover’s dogs were invaluable. “Head’em,” the drover called, and his dogs brought recalcitrant animals into line, nipping the slow to hurry and curious to remain orderly.

During a long day’s drive to the county seat, or a several weeks’ journey to the lowlands of the Carolinas or Georgia, men and beasts surged forward in a turmoil of shouting and noise, dust and mud, autumn’s lingering heat and sudden chills. But on these journeys, the men left their small mountain enclaves for a brief glimpse of the larger world. They returned home not only with bolts of cloth and winter supplies of salt and coffee, but also with news and fresh experiences.

And accounts of these experiences were related in a language that was part of the mountaineer’s unique heritage. That language revealed a great deal about the people; it was strong and flexible, old yet capable of change, sometimes judged “ungrammatical” but often touched with poetry. In a later century, students and collectors would come here seeking the Elizabethan words, the rhythmic cadences of this speech. It harkened back to a distant homeland.

The mountain person’s “afeard” for afraid, or “poke” for paper bag, were familiar to Shakespeare. In Chaucer could be found the mountaineer’s use of “holpt” for helped, and such plurals as “nestes” and “waspes.” Webster confirmed that “hit” was Saxon for it, and the primary meaning of “plague” was anything troublesome or vexatious (the mountain man might well say someone was plaguing him). The habit of turning a noun into a verb often added strength to an otherwise dull sentence: “My farm will grow enough corn to bread us through the winter,” or, when speaking of the heavy shoes that were brogans, “Those hunters just brogued it through the rough places.”

The daily poetry and humor of the mountain language was caught in the names of places--Pretty Hollow Gap, Charlie’s Bunion, Fittified Spring, Miry Ridge, Bone Valley--and in descriptive words like “hells” and “slicks” for the tangled laurel and rhododendron thickets. It was present in the familiar names of plants: “hearts-a-bustin’-with-love,” “dog-hobble,” “farewell summer.” And the patterns of their quilts, pieced with artistic patience and skill, bore names such as “tree of life,” “Bonaparte’s March,” and “double wedding ring.”

Thus, the mountain people adapted their language, as they had their lives, to the needs and beauty of this land they called home. And contrary to what might seem the case, these later residents were a more nearly distinctive group than that which had first come. The pioneers had been a fairly heterogeneous group, but as the years passed, those with itching feet and yearning minds moved on to other frontiers. Restless children wandered west in search of instant gold and eternal youth. In time, those remaining behind became a more and more cohesive group, sharing a particular challenge, history, folklore, economy, dream. Their lives were gradually improving. They had earned the privilege and joy of calling this their homeland.

Spinning and Weaving

National Park Service
]

Like Homer’s Penelope, like the Biblical spinners and weavers, like their sisters at the wheel and loom in many times and places, women of the Great Smokies simultaneously fulfilled the need for sturdy cloth and a need for creating esthetic designs and pleasing patterns. Frances Goodrich, who spent four decades helping to preserve and honor the region’s handicrafts, wrote:

“Hardly any other subject arouses so much enthusiasm and interest in a circle of mountain women as does the subject of weaving and its kindred arts. This is true whether the participants in the talk are themselves weavers or only their kinsfolk. Such work has for generations taken the place of all other artistic expression, and everyone, at least in the days of which I am telling, knew something by experience or by watching the work or by hearsay and tradition, of this fine craft.

... In the younger women who were learning to weave and keeping at it, I could see the growth of character. A slack twisted person cannot make a success as a weaver of coverlets. Patience and perseverance are of the first necessity, and the exercise of these strengthen the fibers of the soul.... One who has had to do with hundreds of mountain girls ... has told me that never did she find one to be of weak and flabby character whose mother was a weaver: there was always something in the child to build on.”

Turning animal and vegetable fibers into cloth necessitated several steps. The fibers had to be washed and then carded, or straightened, with wire-toothed implements. Then the women combed the carded fibers and rolled them onto a rod called a distaff, hence the distaff side of the family. In the next step, Aunt Rhodie Abbott (above) stretches, twists, and winds the fibers with a spinning wheel in Cades Cove.

The women then dyed some of the yarn. In the last step, Becky Oakley (above) weaves the yarn into cloth on a loom. Then the women had to turn the cloth into clothes and other things.

_In some places the Little River Lumber Company, and other logging firms, sent logs cascading down the mountain sides in intricately constructed chutes._

Little River Lumber Company
]

The Sawmills Move In

A people and their style of life do not change drastically in one year or two years or three. The year 1900, then, does not define a time when thousands living in the Great Smokies suddenly abandoned their 19th-century ways and traditions and bounded into the modern world. Real transition would come only with the upheavals of the succeeding decades, only as a result of America’s industrialization and two world wars and the arrival of a national park. Yet the beginning of a new century did inject one major new element into the lifestream of the Great Smoky Mountains: the lumber companies and their money.

The people who lived here had logged before. A man might operate a family enterprise along some hillside or in a low-lying cove, using a few strong-armed relatives or neighbors to help cut and move the choicest timber of the forest. Andy Huff, for example, established a small sawmill in Greenbrier Cove in 1898. Leander Whaley had cut yellow-poplar, buckeye, and linden from the upper cove--along Ramsey Prong--during the 1880s. These and a few other individual loggers felled the largest and most accessible of ultra-valuable woods such as cherry, ash, walnut, hickory, and the giant yellow-poplar, or “tulip tree.” They used steady, slow-plodding oxen to drag the heavy logs to mill, then hauled the lumber to markets and railroads in stout-bedded wagons drawn by four mules, double-teamed.

But the virgin timber soon attracted a wider attention. In 1901, a report on the Southern Appalachians from President Theodore Roosevelt to Congress concluded simply that “These are the heaviest and most beautiful hardwood forests of the continent.” Of the Great Smokies in particular, the report noted that besides the hardwoods the forest contained “the finest and largest bodies of spruce in the Southern Appalachians.” Lumber entrepreneurs were equally impressed. In that same year, three partners paid about $9.70 per hectare for the 34,400-hectare ($3/85,000-acre) bulk of the Little River watershed. Some 20 years later, Col. W. B. Townsend moved from Pennsylvania and took control of Little River Lumber Company.

On the North Carolina slopes of the Smokies, companies purchased land in swaths stretching from ridge to ridge, staking off watersheds like so many claims. In 1903, W. M. Ritter Lumber Company set up its operations along Hazel Creek. A year later, Montvale Lumber Company moved into the adjacent Eagle Creek area. To the west of Montvale would, in time, lie the Kitchin mill and its Twentymile Creek domain; to the east of Ritter, Norwood Lumber Company embraced the reaches of Forney Creek. And looming beside and above them all stood the 36,400 timbered hectares (90,000 acres) of the Champion Coated Paper Company, an area that included Deep Creek and Greenbrier Cove and the headwaters of the Oconaluftee River.

The companies needed men to cut the trees, skid the logs, work the animals, saw the lumber, lay the roads. They called upon the mountaineers who still owned small tracts in Cades Cove and Cataloochee and lower Greenbrier and throughout the Smokies; or they allowed some workers who had sold forested land to stay in their homes, though now on company property; or they brought in hired hands from outside and housed them and their families in dormitory-like buildings and readymade “towns.” These mushrooming mill villages--Elkmont on the Little River, Crestmont on Big Creek, Proctor on Hazel Creek, Ravensford and Smokemont and Fontana--provided a booming cash market for homegrown food and, as soon as the money changed hands, imported products.

More often than not, residents of the Great Smoky Mountains drove to and from market in covered wagons that protected their goods. Because the drive to an outside market such as Waynesville, Newport, or Maryville might take two or even three days, local families sold what they could to the loggers and sawmill men. They set up honey and apple stands along the roads and offered grapes in season. They supplied stores with butter and eggs. Children could trade in one egg for a week’s supply of candy or firecrackers.

A businesslike atmosphere filtered through the quiet of the Smokies. Though wolves and panthers had largely disappeared by 1910, fur buyers and community traders enjoyed a brisk exchange in mink, raccoon, fox, and ’possum hides. Oak bark and chestnut wood, called “tanbark” and “acid wood” because they were sources of valuable tannic acid, brought $7 per cord when shipped to Asheville or Knoxville. As the sawmills flourished, makeshift box houses of vertical poplar and chestnut planks gave way to more substantial weatherboarded homes of horizontal lengths and tight-fitting frames. Slick, fancy, buggy-riding “drummers” peddled high-button shoes and off-color stories. The spacious Wonderland Park Hotel and the Appalachian Club at Elkmont, and a hunting lodge on Jake’s Creek graced the once forbidding mountainsides.

Undergirding this development was a growing cash base: peaches and chestnuts, pork and venison, wax and lard--translated into money--brought flour and sugar, yarn and needles, tools and ammunition. Yet in the midst of this new-found activity, many clung to their old habits. Children still found playtime fun by sliding down hills of pine needles and “riding” poplar saplings from treetop to treetop. Hard-shell Baptist preachers, such as the hunter and “wilderness saddle-bagger” known as “Preacher John” Stinnett, still devoted long spare hours, and sometimes workdays as well, to reading The Book: “I just toted my Bible in a tow sack at the handle of my bull tongue and I studied it at the turn of the furrow and considered it through the rows.”

But whatever the immediate considerations of the hour happened to be, logging was the order of the day. From the Big Pigeon River, all the way to the Little Tennessee, the second generation of timber-cutters had moved into the Smokies on a grand scale.

The companies, with their manpower, their strategically placed sawmills, and their sophisticated equipment, produced board feet of lumber by the millions. The rest of the country, with its increased demands for paper and residential construction, absorbed these millions and cried for more. By 1909, when production attained its peak in the Smokies and throughout the Appalachians, logging techniques had reached such an advanced state that even remote stands of spruce and hemlock could be worked with relative ease. Demand continued unabated and even received a slight boost when World War I broke out in 1914.

_Pages 100-101: Sawmills, such as this one at Lawson’s Sugar Cove, were quickly set up in one location and just as quickly moved to another as soon as the plot was cleared._

National Park Service
]

High volume covered high costs. The Little River Lumber Company, perhaps the most elaborate logging operation in the Smokies, cut a total of two billion board feet. Cherry, the most valuable of the woods, with its exquisite grain and rich color, was also the scarcest. Yellow-poplar, that tall, straight tree with a buoyancy that allowed it to float high, turned out to be the most profitable of all saw timber. Coniferous forests, the thick, dark regions of pungent spruce and hemlock, yielded a portion of the company’s output.

Extraction of such proportions was not easy. Timber cruisers combed the forests, estimating board feet and ax-marking suitable trees. Three-man saw teams followed the cruisers. One, the “chipper,” calculated the fall of the tree and cut a “lead” in the appropriate side. Two sawyers then took over, straining back and forth upon their crosscut saw until gravity and the immense weight of the tree finished their job for them. The work was hard and hazardous. Sometimes, if the lead were not cut properly, the trunk would fall toward the men; sudden death or permanent injury might result from the kickback of a doomed tree’s final crash, or from a moment’s carelessness.

To remove the felled timber, larger companies laid railroad tracks far up the creeks from their mills. At the eastern edge of the Smokies, for instance, one such terminus grew into the village of Crestmont, which boasted a hotel, two movie theaters, and a well-stocked commissary. Such accommodations seemed a distant cry indeed from the upper branches of Big Creek, gathering its waters along the slopes of Mt. Sterling, Mt. Cammerer, and Mt. Guyot. Workers from improbable distances--even countries “across the waters,” such as Italy--teamed with the mountain people to push a standard gauge track alongside the boulder-strewn streams. Bolted onto oaken ties that were spaced far enough apart to discourage foot travel, the black rails drove ahead, switched back to higher ground, crossed Big Creek a dozen times before they reached the flat way station of Walnut Bottoms.

Dominated by powerful, blunt-bodied locomotives, the railroads gave rise to stories that were a flavorful blend of pathos and danger. “Daddy” Bryson and a fireman named Forrester were killed on a sharp curve along Jake’s Creek of Little River. Although Forrester jumped clear when the brakes failed to hold, he was buried under an avalanche of deadly, cascading logs. There were moments of comedy as well as tragedy. In the same river basin, Colonel Townsend asked engineer Noah Bunyan Whitehead one day when he was going to stop putting up all that black smoke from his train. Bun answered: “When they start making white coal.”

Railroads could reach only so far, however. The most complex phase of the logging process was “skidding,” or bringing the felled logs from inaccessible distances to the waiting cars. As the first step, men armed with cant hooks or short, harpoon-like peavies, simply rolled the logs down the mountainsides. Such continuous “ball-hooting,” as it was called, gouged paths which rain and snow etched deeper into scars of heavy erosion. Sometimes oxen and mules pulled, or “snaked,” the timber through rough terrain to its flatcar destination. Horses soon replaced the slower animals and proved especially adept at “jayhooking,” or dragging logs down steep slopes by means of J-hooks and grabs. When the logs gained speed and threatened to overtake them, the men and nimble-footed horses simply stepped onto a spur trail; the open link slipped off at the J-hook and the logs slid on down the slope under their own momentum.

Even more ingenious skidding methods were devised. Splash-dams of vertical hemlock boards created reservoirs on otherwise shallow, narrow streams. The released reservoir, when combined with heavy rains, could carry a large amount of timber far downstream. In the mill pond, loggers with hobnailed boots kept the logs moving and uncorked occasional jams. Another method devised to move virgin timber down steep slopes was the trestled flume. The large, wooden graded flumes provided a rapid but expensive mode of delivery. One carried spruce off Clingmans Dome.

There were, finally, the loader and skidders. The railroad-mounted steam loader was nicknamed the “Sarah Parker” after “a lady who must have been real strong.” The skidder’s revolving drum pulled in logs by spectacular overhead cables. Loaded with massive timber lengths, these cables spanned valleys and retrieved logs from the very mountaintops.

Little River Lumber Company

_Massive steam-powered skidders pulled logs in off the hills to a central pile. Then the loaders took over and put the logs on trains, which carried them to the mills._ ]

To coordinate all of these operations efficiently required skill and judgment. The lumber companies devised numerous approaches to the problem of maximum production at lowest cost. They contracted with individuals; Andy Huff, for example, continued to run a mill at the mouth of Roaring Fork and paid his men a full 75 cents for a 16-hour day. The corporations sometimes worked together; in one maneuver, Little River helped Champion flume its spruce pulpwood to the Little River railroad for shipment to Champion’s paper mill at Canton, North Carolina. Haste and carelessness could lead to shocking waste. When one company moved its operations during World War I, 1.5 million board feet of newly cut timber was left to rot at the head of Big Creek.

The ravages of logging led to fires. Although fires were sometimes set on purpose to kill snakes and insects and to burn underbrush, abnormal conditions invited abnormal mishaps. Parched soil no longer held in place by a web of living roots, dry tops of trees piled where they had been flung after trimming the logs, and flaming sparks of locomotives or skidders: any combination of these caused more than 20 disastrous fires in the Smokies during the 1920s. A two-month series of fires devastated parts of Clingmans Dome, Siler’s Bald, and Mt. Guyot. One holocaust on Forney Creek, ignited by an engine spark, raced through the tops of 24-meter (80-foot) hemlocks and surged over 5 kilometers (3 miles) in four hours. A site of most intense destruction was in the Sawtooth range of the Charlie’s Bunion area.

Despite the ravages of fire, erosion, and the voracious ax and saw, all was not lost. Some two-thirds of the Great Smoky Mountains was heavily logged or burned, but pockets of virgin timber remained in a shrinking number of isolated spots and patches at the head of Cataloochee, the head of Greenbrier, and much of Cosby and Deep Creek. And as the 1920s passed into another decade, the vision of saving what was left of this virgin forest, saving the land--saving the homeland--grew in the lonely but insistent conscience of a small number of concerned and convincing citizens.

National Park Service

_George Washington Shults and some neighbors snake out large trunks with the help of six oxen. Sometimes the lumber companies would hire such local people to handle a specific part of the operation. Today we call the process subcontracting._ ]

Little River Lumber Company

_Of the many kinds of trees logged in the Great Smokies, the largest and most profitable were the yellow-poplars, more commonly known as tulip trees. A man could feel pretty small standing next to one of them._ ]

Little River Lumber Company

_The great scale of the logging machinery was like nothing the Smokies had seen before. Long trains carried loads of huge tree trunks to sawmills after the flat cars were loaded by railroad-mounted cranes._ ]

_Conducting a preliminary survey of the park’s boundaries in 1931 are (from left) Superintendent J. Ross Eakin, Arthur P. Miller, Charles E. Peterson, O. G. Taylor, and John Needham._

George A. Grant
]

Birth of a Park

Logging dominated the life of the Great Smoky Mountains during the early decades of the 20th century. But there was another side to that life. Apart from the sawmills and the railroads and the general stores, which were bustling harbingers of new ways a-coming, the higher forests, the foot trails, and the moonshine stills remained as tokens of old ways a-lingering. One person in particular came to know and speak for this more primitive world.

Horace Kephart was born in 1862 in East Salem, Pennsylvania. His Swiss ancestors were pioneers of the Pennsylvania frontier. During his childhood, Kephart’s family moved to the Iowa prairie, where his mother gave him a copy of the novel _Robinson Crusoe_ by Daniel Defoe. In the absence of playmates on the vast Midwest grassland, young Kephart dreamed and invented his own games, fashioned his own play swords and pistols out of wood and even built a cave out of prairie sod and filled it with “booty” collected off the surrounding countryside.

Horace Kephart never forgot his frontier beginnings. He saved his copy of _Robinson Crusoe_ and added others: _The Wild Foods of Great Britain_, _The Secrets of Polar Travel_, Theodore Roosevelt’s _The Winning of the West_. Camping and outdoor cooking, ballistics and photography captured his attention and careful study.

Kephart polished his education with periods of learning and library work at Boston University, Cornell, and Yale. In 1887 he married a girl from Ithaca, New York, and began to raise a family. By 1890, he was librarian of the well-known St. Louis Mercantile Library. In his late thirties, Kephart grew into a quiet, intense loner, a shy and reticent man with dark, piercing eyes. He remained an explorer at heart, a pioneer, an individual secretly nurturing the hope of further adventures.

Opportunity arrived in a strange disguise. Horace Kephart’s largely unfulfilled visions of escape were combined with increasingly prolonged periods of drinking. Experience with a tornado in the streets of St. Louis affected his nerves. As he later recalled:

“... _then came catastrophe; my health broke down. In the summer of 1904, finding that I must abandon professional work and city life, I came to western North Carolina, looking for a big primitive forest where I could build up strength anew and indulge my lifelong fondness for hunting, fishing and exploring new ground._”

George Masa

_Horace Kephart, librarian-turned-mountaineer, won the hearts of the Smokies people with his quiet and unassuming ways. He played a major role in the initial movement for a national park._ ]

He chose the Great Smokies almost by accident. Using maps and a compass while he rested at his father’s home in Dayton, Ohio, he located the nearest wilderness and then determined the most remote corner of that wilderness. After his recuperation he traveled to Asheville, North Carolina, where he took a railroad line that wound through a honeycomb of hills to the small way station of Dillsboro. And from there, at the age of 42, he struck out, with a gun and a fishing rod and three days’ rations, for the virgin mountainside forest. After camping for a time on Dick’s Creek, his eventual wild destination turned out to be a deserted log cabin on the Little Fork of the Sugar Fork of Hazel Creek.

His nearest neighbors lived 3 kilometers (2 miles) away, in the equally isolated settlement of Medlin. Medlin consisted of a post office, a corn mill, two stores, four dwellings, and a nearby schoolhouse that doubled as a church. The 42 households that officially collected their mail at the Medlin Post Office inhabited an area of 42 square kilometers (16 square miles). It was, as Kephart describes it:

“... _the forest primeval, where roamed some sparse herds of cattle, razorback hogs and the wild beasts. Speckled trout were in all the streams. Bears sometimes raided the fields and wildcats were a common nuisance. Our settlement was a mere slash in the vast woodland that encompassed it._”

But it was also, for Horace Kephart, a new and invigorating home. He loved it. He thrived in it. At first he concentrated his senses on the natural beauty around him, on the purple rhododendron, the flame azalea, the fringed orchis, the crystal clear streams. Yet as the months passed, he found that he could not overlook the people.

The mountain people were as solidly a part of the Smokies as the boulders themselves. These residents of branch and cove, of Medlin and Proctor and all the other tiny settlements tucked high along the slanting creekbeds of the Great Smoky Mountains, these distinctive “back of beyond” hillside farmers and work-worn wives and wary moonshine distillers lodged in Kephart’s consciousness and imagination with rock-like strength and endurance.

Initially silent and suspicious of this stranger in their midst, families gradually came to accept him. They approved of his quietness and his even-handed ways, even confiding in him with a simple eloquence. One foot-weary distiller, after leading Kephart over kilometers of rugged terrain, concluded: “Everywhere you go, it’s climb, scramble, clamber down, and climb again. You cain’t go nowheres in this country without climbin’ both ways.” The head of a large family embracing children who spilled forth from every corner of the cabin confessed: “We’re so poor, if free silver was shipped in by the carload we couldn’t pay the freight.”

Kephart came to respect and to wonder at these neighbors who combined a lack of formal education with a fullness of informal ability. Like him, many of their personal characters blended a weakness for liquor with a strong sense of individual etiquette. He heard, for example, the story of an overnight visitor who laid his loaded gun under his pillow; when he awoke the next morning, the pistol was where he had left it, but the cartridges stood in a row on a nearby table.

He met one George Brooks of Medlin: farmer, teamster, storekeeper, veterinarian, magistrate, dentist. While Brooks did own a set of toothpullers and wielded them mercilessly, some individuals practiced the painful art of tooth-jumping to achieve the same result. Uncle Neddy Carter even tried to jump one of his own teeth; he cut around the gum, wedged a nail in, and made ready to strike the nail with a hammer, but he missed the nail and mashed his nose instead.

None of these fascinating tales escaped the attention of Horace Kephart. As he regained his health, the sustained energy of his probing mind also returned. Keeping a detailed journal of his experiences, he drove himself as he had done in the past. He developed almost an obsession to record all that he learned, to know this place and people completely, to stop time for an interval and capture this mountain way of life in his mind and memory. For three years he lived by the side of Hazel Creek. Though he later moved down to Bryson City during the winters, he spent most of his summers 13 kilometers (8 miles) up Deep Creek at an old cabin that marked the original Bryson Place.

Kephart distilled much of what he learned into a series of books. _The Book of Camping and Woodcraft_ appeared in 1906 as one of the first detailed guidebooks to woodsmanship, first aid, and the art we now call “backpacking,” all based on his personal experience and knowledge. There is even a chapter on tanning pelts. But the most authoritative book concerned the people themselves. _Our Southern Highlanders_, published in 1913 and revised nine years later, faithfully retraces Kephart’s life among the Appalachian mountain folk after he “left the tame West and came into this wild East.” And paramount among the wilds of the East was the alluring saga of the moonshiner.

Laura Thornborough

_Wiley Oakley, his wife, and children gather on the porch of their Scratch Britches home at Cherokee Orchard with “Minnehaha.” Oakley always said, “I have two women: one I talk to and one who talks to me.”_ ]

National Park Service

_Oakley was a park guide before there was a park. And in that role he nearly always wore a red plaid shirt. He developed friendships with Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller and became known as the “Will Rogers of the Smokies.”_ ]

In Horace Kephart’s own eyes, his greatest education came from the spirited breed of mountain man known as “blockade runners” or simply “blockaders.” These descendants of hard-drinking Scotsmen and Irishmen had always liked to “still” a little corn whisky to drink and, on occasion, to sell. But as the 1920s opened into the era of Prohibition, the mountain distiller of a now contraband product reached his heyday. He found and began to supply an expanding, and increasingly thirsty market.

Stealth became the keynote in this flourishing industry. Mountaineers searched out laurel-strangled hollows and streams that seemed remote even to their keen eyes. There they assembled the copper stills into which they poured a fermented concoction of cornmeal, rye, and yeast known as “sour mash” or “beer.” By twice heating the beer and condensing its vapors through a water-cooled “worm” or spiral tube, they could approximate the uncolored liquor enjoyed at the finest New York parties. And by defending themselves with shotguns rather than with words, they could continue their approximations.

In this uniquely romantic business, colorful characters abounded on both sides of the law. Horace Kephart wrote about a particular pair of men who represented the two legal extremes: the famous moonshiner Aquilla Rose, and the equally resilient revenuer from the Internal Revenue Service, W. W. Thomason.

Aquilla, or “Quill,” Rose lived for 25 years at the head of sparsely populated Eagle Creek. After killing a man in self-defense and hiding out in Texas awhile, Rose returned to the Smokies with his wife and settled so far up Eagle Creek that he crowded the Tennessee-North Carolina state line. Quill made whisky by the barrel and seemed to drink it the same way, although he was occasionally seen playing his fiddle or sitting on the porch with his long beard flowing and his Winchester resting across his lap. His eleventh Commandment, to “never get ketched,” was faithfully observed, and Quill Rose remained one of the few mountain blockaders to successfully combine a peaceable existence at home with a dangerous livelihood up the creek.

W.W. Thomason visited Horace Kephart at Bryson City in 1919. Kephart accepted this “sturdy, dark-eyed stranger” as simply a tourist interested in the moonshining art. While Thomason professed innocence, his real purpose in the Smokies was to destroy stills which settlers were operating on Cherokee lands to evade the local law. He prepared for the job by taking three days to carve and paint a lifelike rattlesnake onto a thick sourwood club. During the following weeks, he would startle many a moonshiner by thrusting the stick close and twisting it closer.

When Kephart led the “Snake-Stick Man” into whiskyed coves in the Sugarlands or above the Cherokee reservation, he found himself deputized and a participant in the ensuing encounters. More often than not, shots rang out above the secluded thickets. In one of these shootouts, Thomason’s hatband, solidly woven out of hundreds of strands of horsehair, saved this fearless revenuer’s life.

_Aquilla Rose stands proudly with his mowing machine outside his home near Eagle Creek. He didn’t stand that still when revenuers came around._

National Park Service
]

All the wonders of the Great Smoky Mountains--the nature, the people, the stories, and the battles and the jests--affected Horace Kephart mightily. This man whose own life had been “saved” by the Smokies began to think in terms of repaying this mountain area in kind. For during his years on Hazel Creek and Deep Creek and in Bryson City, he saw the results of the “loggers’ steel,” results that caused him to lament in a single phrase, “slash, crash, go the devastating forces.” In 1923 he summarized his feelings about the lumber industry:

“_When I first came into the Smokies the whole region was one superb forest primeval. I lived for several years in the heart of it. My sylvan studio spread over mountain after mountain, seemingly without end, and it was always clean and fragrant, always vital, growing new shapes of beauty from day to day. The vast trees met overhead like cathedral roofs.... Not long ago I went to that same place again. It was wrecked, ruined, desecrated, turned into a thousand rubbish heaps, utterly vile and mean._”

Edouard E. Exline

_When the Civilian Conservation Corps moved into the Smokies in the 1930s, young men from the cities saw moonshine stills firsthand. Here one pretends to be a moonshiner and hangs his head low for the photographer._ ]

_Grace Newman sits enraptured as Jim Proffit plays the guitar._

Burton Wolcott
]

Kephart began to think in terms of a national park. He and a Japanese photographer friend, George Masa, trekked the Smokies and gathered concrete experience and evidence of the mountains’ wild splendor. At every opportunity, Kephart advocated the park idea in newspapers, in brochures, and by word of mouth. He proudly acknowledged that “I owe my life to these mountains and I want them preserved that others may profit by them as I have.”

The concept of a national park for these southern mountains was not a new one in 1920. Forty years earlier, a retired minister and former state geologist, Drayton Smith, of Franklin, North Carolina, had proposed “a national park in the mountains.” In 1885, Dr. Henry O. Marcy of Boston, Massachusetts, had discussed future health resorts in America and had considered “the advisability of securing under state control a large reservation of the higher range as a park.” By the turn of the century, the Appalachian National Park Association was formed in Asheville, North Carolina, and publicized the idea of a national park somewhere in the region, not specifically the Great Smokies. When the Federal Government seemed to rule out this possibility, the Association devoted the bulk of its time and effort to the creation of national forest reserves.

But people like Horace Kephart knew the difference between a national park that safeguarded trees and a national forest that allowed logging. In 1923, a group supporting a genuine Great Smokies park formed in Knoxville, Tennessee. Mr. and Mrs. Willis P. Davis, of the Knoxville Iron Company, in the summer of that year had enjoyed a trip to some of the country’s western parks. As they viewed the wonders preserved therein, Mrs. Davis was reminded of the natural magnificence near her own home. “Why can’t we have a national park in the Great Smokies?” she asked her husband.

Back in Knoxville, Mr. Davis began to ask that question of friends and associates. One of these was Col. David C. Chapman, a wholesale druggist, who listened but did not heed right away:

“_Not until I accidentally saw a copy of President Theodore Roosevelt’s report on the Southern Appalachians did I have any idea of just what we have here. In reading and rereading this report I learned for the first time that the Great Smokies have some truly superlative qualities. After that I became keenly interested in Mr. Davis’ plan and realized that a national park should be a possibility._”

The Davises and Chapman led the formation of the Great Smoky Mountains Conservation Association. Congressmen and Secretary of the Interior Hubert Work were contacted. Work endorsed the project, and two years later Congress passed an act authorizing associations in Tennessee and North Carolina to buy lands and deed them to the U.S. Government.

Problems immediately presented themselves. The citizens would have to buy this park. Unlike Yellowstone and other previous land grants from the Federal Government, the Smokies were owned by many private interests and therefore presented a giant challenge to hopeful fund raisers. To further complicate matters, no group had the power to condemn lands; any property, if secured at all, would have to be coaxed from its owner at an appropriately high price. Finally, and most discouragingly, park enthusiasts faced an area of more than 6,600 separate tracts and thousands of landowners.

Yet events conspired to give the park movement a sustaining drive. The lumber companies had made the people of the Smokies more dependent on money for additional food, modern-day clothing, and new forms of recreation. World War I and the coming of the highways had instilled a restlessness in the mountain people, a yearning for new sights and different ways of living. Some began to echo the sentiments of one farmer who, after realizing meager returns for his hard labor on rocky fields, looked around him and concluded, “Well, I reckon a park is about all this land is fit for.”

Determined leadership overcame obstacles large and small. Behind Chapman’s professorial appearance--his wire-rimmed glasses and three-piece suits and unkempt hair--was a man who had been a colonel in World War I, a man who had resolved to make the dream of a national park into a reality. Along with Chapman as the driving force, associate director of the National Park Service Arno B. Cammerer provided the steering and the gears. Cammerer’s marked enthusiasm for incorporating the Great Smokies into the national park system added a well-placed, influential spokesman to the movement. By spring of 1926, groups in North Carolina and Tennessee had raised more than a million dollars. Within another year, the legislatures of the two states each had donated twice that amount.

With $5 million as a nest egg, park advocates turned to the actual buying of lands. Cammerer himself defined a boundary which included the most suitable territory and which, as it turned out, conformed closely to the final boundary. Chapman and his associates approached individual homeowners. Sometimes they received greetings similar to one on a homemade sign:

“_Col. Chapman. You and Hoast are notify. Let the Cove People Alone. Get Out. Get Gone. 40 m. Limit._”

The older mountain people clung desperately to what they had. Even though the buyers were prepared to issue lifetime leases for those who wanted to stay, they found it difficult to remove this resolute band from their homeland.

Many of the Smokies’ residents--the younger, more mobile, more financially oriented ones--accepted the coming of the park with a combination of fatalism and cautious hope. Gradually they acknowledged the fact that a park and its tourist trade might be a continuing asset, whereas the prosperity from logging had proved at best only temporary. After John D. Rockefeller, Jr., through the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund, doubled the park fund with a much-needed gift of an additional $5 million, renewed offers of cash completely melted many icy objections.

The lumber companies followed suit, but for higher stakes. Champion Fibre, Little River, Suncrest, Norwood, and Ritter were among the 18 timber and pulpwood companies that owned more than 85 percent of the proposed park area. They fought to stay for obvious economic reasons, yet they were prepared to leave if the price was right. Little River Lumber Company, after considerable negotiation with the state of Tennessee and the city of Knoxville, sold its 30,345 hectares (75,000 acres) for only $8.80 per hectare ($3.57 per acre).

The vast holdings of Champion Fibre Company were at the very heart of the park, however, and the results of the company’s resistance to a national park were central to success or failure of the whole movement. Champion’s 36,400 hectares (90,000 acres) included upper Greenbrier, Mt. Guyot, Mt. LeConte, the Chimneys, and a side of Clingmans Dome, crowned by extensive forests of virgin spruce. This splendid domain was the cause of hot tempers, torrid accusations, rigid defenses, and a hard-fought condemnation lawsuit. In the end, however, on March 30, 1931, Champion Fibre agreed to sell for a total of $3 million, a sum which took on added appeal during the slump of the disastrous Depression.

Four days after this agreement, Horace Kephart died in an automobile accident near Cherokee, North Carolina. An 8-ton boulder was later brought from the hills above Smokemont to mark his grave in Bryson City.